Folks: 

Below, please find the full text of an extraordinarily fascinating article 
which pertains to the  effects of sex/gender differentials in wage-earning 
to post-operative MTF and FTM transsexual persons. 

Best,
 Alison Reiheld 

Alison Reiheld
History, Philosophy, & Sociology of Science
Lyman Briggs College
Michigan State University
Co-editor, Questions: Philosophy for Young People
[log in to unmask]
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If Women Were More Like Men: Why Females Earn Less
By John Cloud
Friday, Oct. 03, 2008
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1847194,00.html 

One of the oldest debates in contemporary social science is why women earn 
less than men. Conservatives tend to argue that because women anticipate 
taking time off to raise children, they have fewer incentives to work hard 
in school, and they choose careers where on-the-job training and long hours 
are less important. Liberals tend to focus on sex discrimination as the 
explanation. Obviously some mixture of those factors is at work, but 
academics have long been frustrated when they try to estimate which force is 
greater: women's choices or men's discrimination. 

A new study looks at this problem in a wonderfully inventive way. In 
previous studies, academics have looked at variables like years of education 
and the effects of outside forces such as nondiscrimination policies. But 
gender was always the constant. What if it didn't have to be? What if you 
could construct an experiment in which a random sample of adults 
unexpectedly changes sexes before work one day? Kristen Schilt, a 
sociologist at the University of Chicago and Matthew Wiswall, an economist 
at New York University, couldn't quite pull off that study. But they have 
come up with the first systematic analysis of the experiences of transgender 
people in the labor force. And what they found suggests that raw 
discrimination remains potent in U.S. companies. 

Schilt and Wiswall found that women who become men (known as FTMs) do 
significantly better than men who become women (MTFs). MTFs in the study 
earned, on average, 32% less after they transitioned from male to female, 
even after the authors controlled for factors like education levels. FTMs 
earned an average of 1.5% more. The study was just published in the Berkeley 
Electronic Press' peer-reviewed Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy. 

The men and women in the study had already gone to school and made their 
career choices. Some of them changed jobs after they transitioned, and some 
stayed in the same jobs. Some were out to their employers; others started 
completely new lives as members of the opposite sex. Regardless, the overall 
pattern was very clear: newly minted women were punished, and newly minted 
men got a little bump-up in pay. 

Still, the paper is complex, so it's useful to step back first and look at 
where the larger debate over the gender wage gap stands. After all, isn't 
that gap narrowing to the point of obscurity? Actually, no. The Russell Sage 
Foundation published the most authoritative work on the gender wage gap in 
2006, The Declining Significance of Gender?. In the book, Francine Blau and 
Lawrence Kahn, both Cornell economists, show that the average full-time 
female worker in the U.S. earns about 79% of what the average full-time male 
worker makes. Women employed full-time actually tend to have slightly more 
education than men, but women are still more likely to work in clerical and 
service jobs. Blau and Kahn say women do make different choices when they 
decide on college majors and jobs — even highly educated women more often 
choose "female" occupations that pay less — but the authors also note that 
discrimination persists. As one example, they cite a 2000 study which found 
that when symphony orchestras switched to blind auditions — those in which 
the musicians play behind a screen — women had a significantly better 
chance of being hired. 

The good news is that the gender wage gap has narrowed. In 1978, full-time 
women workers earned just 61% of what full-time men did, compared to 79% 
now. But what to make of the big difference in the experiences of those 
transgenders who have become women versus those who have become men? Schilt, 
one of the authors of the new article, interviewed a female-to-male 
transgender attorney a few years ago. As a younger attorney, the lawyer had 
been Susan; now he was Thomas. He told Schilt that after he transitioned 
from female to male, another lawyer mistakenly believed that Susan had been 
fired and replaced by Thomas. The other lawyer commended the firm's boss for 
the replacement. He said Susan had been incompetent; "the new guy," he 
added, was "just delightful." (Later, Ben Barres, an FTM neurobiology 
professor at Stanford, told The Wall Street Journal of a similar experience. 
An attendee at one of his lectures leaned over to a colleague and said, "Ben 
Barres' work is much better than his sister's.") 

Such stories help explain an interesting feature of transgender life: men 
who want to change outward gender wait an average of 10 years longer to 
transition than women, according to the new article by Schilt and Wiswall. 
"MTFs attempt to preserve their male advantage at work for as long as 
possible," they write, "whereas FTMs may seek to shed their female gender 
identity more quickly." It should be noted that many transgender men do 
experience discrimination, especially if they are short and if they don't 
look convincingly male. Also, it's harder for MTFs to pass than FTMs: men 
who become women still have large hands and bigger frames. The 
less-convincing appearance of MTFs probably explains part of the reason they 
earn so much less after they transition. Still, the new paper suggests an 
entirely new vein of research in the field. It also suggests that if you're 
thinking about changing sexes, you should carefully consider the economic 
consequences.